BERLIN (Reuters) - German Nobel Prize
winning author Guenter Grass kicked
off a national debate with the publication
of a novel on Tuesday focusing on the
suffering of German World War Two refugees
fleeing the Red Army in the east. Millions
of Germans were expelled from Poland,
Russia and Czechoslovakia after World War
Two, losing their homes and roots as
ordinary citizens paid the price for
Adolf Hitler's war that left 50
million dead across Europe.

Their suffering is rarely commemorated
in a nation still seeking to overcome the
shadows of Nazi crimes. Grass's latest
book "Crab Walk" focuses on the plight of
the German liner 'Wilhelm Gustloff"
carrying thousands of refugees from near
Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) which a
Russian submarine sank in January
1945.

More than
8,000 people died in what became
known as Germany's Titanic -- more than
five times as many as the 1,500 who lost
their lives when the real Titanic sank in
1912.

Yet while the 'Wilhelm Gustloff" is one
of the worst disasters in sea-faring
history, its story is scarcely known even
in Germany. History lessons have avoided
the subject, mindful of Germans' role as
aggressors rather than victims in the war,
and the fate of the ship has been the
domain of neo-Nazi propaganda.

"With this book Guenter Grass keeps the
tragedy of millions of people who suffered
greatly in the expulsion from the east or
who lost their lives from being
forgotten,"former Foreign Minister
Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote in his
newspaper column. "Guenter Grass is
writing not to settle scores, but to
counter forgetting about the horrors and
the distress always associated with the
war," he said.

About 9,000 refugees and wounded
soldiers boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff on a
freezing January 30, 1945, day hoping to
escape the rapidly approaching Soviet
army. But the ship -- named after an
assassinated
Nazi official and launched as the world's
largest cruise liner in 1937 -- was hit by
Russian torpedoes that evening.

"Thousands of people immediately broke
into a terrible panic,"survivor Karl
Hoffmann wrote later. "They clawed their
way upward, pushing and shoving
mercilessly." "Those who fell were lost.
Children that slipped from their
mothers"arms were trampled to death."

Raw
wounds

Grass was born in the Baltic city of
Danzig and most of his best work has been
set in that port city.

He has long served as the voice of a
German generation that came of age in
Hitler's war and bore the burden of their
parents' guilt.

"My mother and I fled over land,"
widely read columnist Franz Joseph
Wagner wrote in the popular Bild
newspaper on Tuesday. "So many of my
relatives died while fleeing."

"We, the expelled, may cry together.
(Grass), I thank you for this,"he
wrote.

Yet the suffering of Germans expelled
from the east remains a diplomatic can of
worms, especially as the European Union
prepares to expand to the east in Poland
and the Czech Republic. Many locals there
fear Germans will use EU rules to try to
claim or buy back pre-war property once
within German borders.

Conservative chancellor candidate
Edmund Stoiber has recently angered
Czech leaders by defending Germans who
were expelled from the Sudeten region now
in the Czech Republic. When Germany
started compensating Nazi-era slave
labourers, some Germans forced to work in
Stalin's post-war Soviet Union said they
deserved money too. Germany and Russia
ignored them.

The debate may now intensify. "In the
likely bestseller, Grass has broken a
historical taboo," Die Welt
newspaper wrote in a front-page Tuesday
story.

IT is
characteristic that not one of the
"brave"German historians -- the
conformists -- has dared to tackle this
topic, or any other such taboo subject
like the criminal saturation bombing of
European civilians, or the sinking by
one Canadian fighter-bomber of the
liners Cap Arcona and
Deutschland in the Gulf of
Lübeck two or three days before
the war ended, with the death of ten
thousand more civilian refugees.
Wilhelm Gustloff, the "Nazi
official," was head of the Swiss branch
of the NSDAP; he was assassinated in
Switzerland in 1936 by a Jewish
murderer, Frankfurter, who was
put on trial and jailed in Switzerland.
Hitler ordered that there was to
be no revenge campaign after the
assassination. The ship named after
Gustloff was a Kraft durch Freude
liner, built for the leisure cruises of
the German mass labour movement, the
DAF.

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